Ericsson pledges support for AT&T-driven OpenECOMP initiative

Swedish vendor Ericsson is looking to accelerate industry alignment in NFV and SDN management and orchestration.

Ericsson has jumped on the OpenECOMP management and orchestration bandwagon, announcing that it will support AT&T’s software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV)-related software networking initiative.

OpenECOMP, through the Linux Foundation, will provide automation and management software to the open source community to accelerate the development and adoption of new technologies in the carrier ecosystem.

Like AT&T, Ericsson said that it also believes in a modular and model-driven management and orchestration system with analytics and policy-based control.

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The Swedish vendor wants to accelerate industry alignment in NFV and SDN management and orchestration. To fulfill this vision, Ericsson said it will support service providers that deploy OpenECOMP and work with AT&T to encourage industry alignment.

In addition to OpenECOMP, Ericsson supports other related projects like OpenStack, Linux, OpenDaylight and OPNFV, which allow network operators to address the challenge of crafting services from these components in a sustainable manner. Ericsson said it will support different open source orchestration and management projects, like OpenECOMP, that establish a clear method to articulate and communicate the operational needs of carriers for next generation networks.

Ericsson can also extend its learnings from OpenECOMP with vendor partners Cisco, Huawei and Nokia. In December, the four vendors signed a joint memorandum of understanding (MoU) to create the NFV Interoperability Testing Initiative (NFV-ITI) with an aim to assist service providers with NFV deployment and cloud transformation within multivendor network environments.

The timing of Ericsson’s support of OpenECOMP follows a recent pact Amdocs and the Linux Foundation developed to accelerate adoption of the open source Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform developed by AT&T. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, this new project will make ECOMP open source available to service providers and cloud developers in 2017.